January 2009

Off the bat, I think it’s important to mention what will probably be the biggest sticking point for most of you: the price. This t-shirt costs €105. Whether the economy was in the tank or not, that would be a pretty tough sell, but I do think that Cassida are doing a lot more than some other premium t-shirt brands to help you justify dropping that cash on a tee.

The metaphor is fairly obvious, businessmen are gladiators, and I’m sure that there’s a lot of people working on Wall Street in America and Docklands in England that would agree with such sentiment. To a degree I can just about see how that works, especially if you extend the metaphor to include what Michael Quester, the man behind Cassida who has also previously been a winner at Design By Humans, wants to bring from the brand; reimagining the extravagance and opulence of the Roman empire in his first independent line of clothing. I guess that explains the rhinestones and foil then.

There is some really interesting stuff going on with these Cassida tees, and I’m really surprised that there isn’t much mention of it on their site because there has clearly been a huge amount of effort put into producing a highly-customised tee of very high quality. Compared to a ‘normal’ t-shirt, almost every aspect of Cassida’s blanks has been changed in some way; there’s little cuts on the hem to create a vintage look, and it actually works, it doesn’t look like someone just got bored with a pair of scissors. There’s inside-out stitching all over the place, which adds to the interest, and I really like the quad-stitching (anyone care to enlighten me with a correct technical term?) around the neck.

The tees do run pretty small, but they feel really good, easily some of the best I’ve ever come across, and the printing is of a high-quality too, and that includes the oft-troublesome glitter/foil areas. The tees comes in a cardboard box that has the Cassida logo on it, which is a nice-touch and helps reinforce the luxury feel of the brand.

Cassida are clearly producing t-shirts of a very high standard, but it would be very hard for me to justify spending €105 on a single t-shirt, though having said that, judging by the shops I’ve browsed in St Tropez numerous times (but never bought anything), there is certainly a market for t-shirts around that price point, and people that are willing to buy them.

Fuzzy Ink continue to push the still-popular trend of mustaches with their latest release, which is another play on Lego men and their many possible identities. For me, the most fun part of this tee is the other heads that are strewn across the floor, especially the mime artist style heading that is peaking out on the right side of the pile.

I saw this tee a month or so ago, and now I feel like a bit of a chump for not posting it, firstly because part of the profits go to charity, and also because now that loads of other blogs have posted about the glow in the dark tee featuring lots of things white people like (a list of which can be found after the break) it seems like I’m just following the crowd. I like the design, and I like glow in the dark tees, but to be honest, I don’t really know what the glow aspect of this tee is bringing to the table in this instance.

In case you’re unaware, Stuff White People Like, is a blog about… stuff white people like. It’s usually a funny read, and it’s usually right too (so what if I like sushi?). Part of the profits from the sale of the tee go to Children of the Night, and so far they’ve raised $3,600 to bring kids off the street and away from forced prostitution, and helped white people wear ironic tees in the process, which we like, so everyone’s a winner!

I know I mention KIKSTYOs collaborations with models too much, but the strange thing is, these posts are actually pretty popular according to my stats, and people aren’t searching for the women featured on the tees (most of which are gravure models), they’re actually searching for the tees themselves, so I guess that some people must really like them. I had wondered what the quality would be like on these photo-tees, even though they’re largely in grayscale, but judging by this picture on Flickr they look pretty good.

I don’t really know enough about typography to take a real stab at dissecting this design, but I assume that the lines running around the word ‘type’ are guides that people use when they’re designing new fonts? The design doesn’t really do it for me, but I would assume that I’d have a type-rection right now if I’d played Helvetica: The Movie so many times that I’d managed to wear out the disc.

Just in case you thought that the Statue of Liberty was a bit depressing or confrontational, here’s a lighter take on Lady Liberty. It’s a pity that the print wasn’t a little bit bigger, but I like the concept.

I don’t think I’ve ever featured a hoodie dress produced by American Apparel before. It pretty much looks like a regular hoodie, I presume it must just be longer than a normal one. Any ladies in the audience own a hoodie dress? And if so, why?

As this review is auto-posted to Hide Your Arms (almost everything you read on here isn’t written on the same day as it is posted), I will beam sat on the train down to London to have the final interview at the American Embassy, hopefully resulting in me receiving a visa meaning I can finally fly to America to begin my internship, so I thought it would be appropriate to review a t-shirt that features that most American of icons, the Statue of Liberty.

Obviously, this isn’t your Grandma’s Statue of Liberty (I’ve always wanted to use that phrase), it is a Statue of Liberty that I’m sure some elements of America would agree more accurately represents the country that they live in today, even if change came to America just last week. Perhaps in time Lady Liberty will be able to swap her gun for the ice cream that she usually holds aloft.

On the back-right should of the tee there is some text (check out the gallery for close-ups) about how everyone in America is a ‘gangsta’ and that Liberty comes by the way of the gun. I don’t really think that it’s too necessary to the tee, for me, it just re-emphasizes the message when it’s already pretty clear what is going on.

If we were to chat quality, I’d have to give this tee a thumbs up. The tee feels lovely and soft, and whilst I think that the printing method is just regular old plastisol, it doesn’t feel too heavy despite being a pretty big print. Since Akomplice are a streetwear company, their sizes do run a fair bit larger than most of the companies that usually get reviewed here on HYA, I don’t think they’re massive though, the tee is probably a regular size and I’ve just become too used to wearing slim sized American Apparel tees, so I’d only recommend ordering a size down if you want a tight tee.

There is a little tag on the sleeve with Akomplice’s stylized logo on it. I quite like the way the white tag contrasts with the black of the tee, but you may hate it, in which case it shouldn’t be too hard to cut it off or pull out the stitching. There’s also a custom Akomplice hang tag in the tee, which looks rather nice.

Threadless : They’ve got a quick 3-day sale (more like 2.5 days sale at the time of posting) going on to celebrate getting 5,000 new people to become fans of their on Facebook, a page which currently has 28,000 fans. On Wednesday they’re going to be giving 5 lucky fans a year-long membership to the 12 month club, I’d encourage you to become a fan just to be eligible for that, but as your odds are likely to be less than 6,000 to 1 there isn’t much point getting your hopes up. The sale has knocked $3 off hundreds of the tees.

krudmart: Continuing their comeback trail, get 30% off at Krudmart by using the coupon code coldsnap. No word on when this code will stop being valid, and they’re keeping the “spend more than $50, get free priority shipping” offer going too.

Burp! Boutique: They’ve knocked 50% off all thier Rimo-To and Stunt Double tees, as well as some jewelry by LadyLuckRulesOK.

If you own a store and want to get the word out about your sale feel free to mention it in the comments, but get too spammy and I might delete the comment, you have been warned!

Considering how little attention T-Shirt Hell used to get from the tee blogging world, the announcement of their closure seems to be creating quite a stir. I think they didn’t get much attention simply because most of ‘us’ didn’t care for their style of design, and also it’s pretty rare to find a blog that regularly writes about offensive t-shirts like the ones T-Shirt Hell sold.

The story, and with T-Shirt Hell it’s always hard to tell what the truth is, is that after receiving hate mail for more than 8 years, the founder and owner of the brand, Sunshine Megatron (no, really), has decided that enough is enough, and instead of selling on a business that sells 3000 t-shirts a week to someone that won’t do it justice, he’s just going to close the doors on February 10th and be done with it. There’s a long and fairly funny open letter on their site if you want to check it out, but I’ve given you the gist of it just then.

For me, I won’t be sad to see them go. I rarely found the tees particularly funny, and I do think that some of them crossed the line in terms of subject matter. I totally understand that the tees themselves are not meant to be hate speech, they’re meant to be sarcastic and ironic, but sarcasm and irony are almost entirely determined by their context and not the t-shirt itself. Let’s say a black guy was wearing the “Arrest black babies before they become criminals” t-shirt, fair enough, I get it, that’s actually a fairly powerful political and social statement, but what if it was a racist wearing the same tee and actually wanted to lock up black babies? I know there’s no way for T-Shirt Hell to control who wears their shirts, but I’ve never liked their idea that just because the tees aren’t meant to cause offense means that they aren’t meant offensive.

You have until February 10th to purchase tees that I’ve never seen anyone in public wearing.

With all the Philly/visa madness of last week (which is only intensifying this week) I completely forgot to mention that Hide Your Arms turned 3 years old last week on the 21st. Huzzah!

Thanks for reading, commenting, linking, sending me tees, tips and tweets over the past few years. Now is probably a good time to mention that I won’t be posting quite so much over the next few weeks, due to the aforementioned Philly madness, but I will be trying to get as many reviews as possible done because I’ve got a lot of tees sat in my bedroom waiting to be photographed and written about.

Everyone’s favourite Brazilian t-shirt design competition that frustratingly still doesn’t have an English-language version, Camisteria, have released four new tees and a couple of reprints (the rest are in the gallery), but since I’ve never seen the two reprints before then they’re all new to me.

I’ve just had a thought, is it even possible for people that don’t live in Brazil to buy the tees? I tried robo-translating it but it wasn’t much help and I couldn’t work it out, have any readers ever bought from Camiseteria?

I found out through Seibei‘s Twitter (see, it isn’t just used for talking about what you just ate) that Fantastic Bonanza has quietly shut up shop and stopped selling t-shirts, as the picture above (which is what you see when you go to their site). I don’t know when this development came about, perhaps one of the former FB crew will be reading and let us know, but it’s always sad to see a good tee company shut down.

I thought that since this will hopefully mark the week that I become a (temporary) immigrant to the US, it would make sense to post about a company called Immigrant Apparel who’ve been sitting in my inbox for a couple of weeks (which makes them relatively new compared to a lot of e-mails I’ve got).

The tightly merchandised collection features yarn dyed knit tops, custom fleece, lightweight jackets and two styles of custom fitted, screen printed t-shirts. All our products are manufactured in Portugal using only the best European fabrics. The collection fuses classic styling with a focus on modern day functionality, all created with dedicated attention to detail.

I am getting a little bit ahead of myself (much like with my trip to the US, oh the parallels!), as Immigrant, who are also a record label, aren’t opening the doors to their online store until the start of February, so if you like what you see then bookmark them and head back in a week or two.

You know who’s consistent? Gama-Go, they are consistent. The designs are interesting but not to crazy, plenty of little touches like contrast coloured strings, contrast hood linings, and sometimes putt a little sometihng extra on the sleeve like they have done with this hoodie. When I first looked at this hoodie I didn’t actually notice the mountainous aspect, presuming that it had raglan sleeves, but then when I realised that it wasn’t, I got the joke, and it’s actually pretty clever.

I thought I’d better point out that clouds don’t have to be sad all the time, and this lovely sweater seemed to be a pretty good opportunity to show that. You know what would be cool, if someone did the same thing, but instead of normal clouds, they made clouds that looked kinda like real things, like that game you play in the summer when you’ve got nothing better to do than lie on the grass (get a job, hippie!).